There's a storm in my teacup!

Well, in my dollar store mug.

Rock Band dilemma. I want to design a band. I need a singer, a drummer, and two guitarists. I want a themed band, though - a group of characters entertaining enough that people would want to use them over the hassle of designing their own characters, if they get the joke. The game's quite limited for true customising, it's just the naming of a character that would truly get someone to guess persona A was indeed persona A.

Ashamed to say I'm quite washed out for band ideas - the only thing that comes to mind is apparently the in-joke of my mind. I am tempted to create a band named "The Communists" and throw Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Che and/or Castro (Trotsky? Chavez?) into the mixer. Obvious band colours and designs to be made there. Something entertaining in my mind of these figureheads rocking out.

Beyond that, let's see. The last few days have been quiet at work, which leads to pranks. They're stories I can't write out without losing the humour, they're more "you had to be there" moments, but between me and Chris, we managed to convince an ex-co-worker who moved to another store that he'd won a $60 game and potentially a $400 game system, and just needed to call a telephone number that was sent in an email. The problem? His store received the email as unintelligible garbage. He came over to our store on his break for other reasons, but he asked us to see the email we got, because we told him we received the email just fine. We handed over a printout of garbled text, having highlighted certain areas of the garble in yellow highlighter, implying that calling "D0fLdO7nL2y" would offer him untold riches. He found it entertaining, saying how on the drive he was excited about trying to work out how to win the big system, but was already writing his chances off. His expectations were low, but hopeful, and dropped to no hope of winning the fictional prize with good humour.

We also proceeded to teach him how to produce "barcode stickers" - our system is set to produce barcodes for different SKUs, but I'd messed around a little and found out how to type in letters. Of course, we didn't tell him how to type the letters in, in the easy way. We explained how we worked out the correlation between certain numbers and letters, after looking at barcodes on magazines. We continued to explain that we'd worked out how the numbers aligned to letters, and henceforth words. And that by typing in a code akin to texting (A = 2, B = 22, C = 222, D = 3, etc) you could formulate your own custom stickers with your specialized name and barcode. Cue him frantically trying to work out how to reproduce what we'd done at his workplace, wasting a good 40 minutes of time and many phone calls where me and Chris could barely keep ourselves from laughing and being caught out. We eventually called up and asked how he was doing, to which he said, "You know, I found a far easier way... if you just type in the letters, you don't have to do any code-breaking at all, which is good because I've got pages of numbers and none of it was working... you know this already, didn't you? ...you jerks!"

He found it entertaining. It cemented my faith that I love people that are intelligent, energetic, humble and appreciative of surprises, and remarkably gullible. They make the time fly by, when necessary.